Grant: CCI Applied Research and Development Grants

GURIT is a company focused on advanced composite materials for wind turbine industry and lightweighting. They are a leading manufacturer and supplier of advanced composite materials, tooling automation, core kitting and composite structural engineering services. Their materials range comprises structural core materials, structural profiles, prepregs, and formulated products such as laminating resins and adhesives. To maintain their technological leadership and increase the sustainability of their product offering, GURIT has been continuously exploring the optimization and reengineering of its Corecell™ structural foam at its Magog (Qc) production site and R&D laboratory. The main goal of this project is to optimize and fine-tune one critical component of Corecell™ M SAN structural foam. Because KEMITEK (formerly OLEOTEK) is a long term research partner of GURIT (since 2009), the priority will be to have KEMITEK: 1) understand the role of a critical comonomer in a proprietary SAN (styrene-acrylonitrile) copolymer, in order to adjust and/or reduce its level in the formulation to decrease overall toxicity, costs, and process complexity, 2) improve the knowledge on the actual polymerization mechanism and develop a polymerization process resulting in a main ABABA polymer microstructure to improve mechanical properties, 3) investigate, propose and test potential critical monomer substitute and rebalancing the formulation to maintain or improve overall Corecell™ performances. In summary, the main innovation will be to develop and optimize a new version of Corecell™ M structural foam perfectly tailored to the user's stringent requirements. The specifications include solving health and handling problems, as well as maintaining or improving all technical points related to production, outgassing, mechanical properties, chemical resistance, resin absorption, thermal stability, compression properties, water absorption, processing and finishing. More specifically, several sanitary and technical (process) issues, as well as targeted performance improvements, will be simultaneously resolved as part of this research project.